Sunday, 14 August 2011

A Family Feud by Gerrit Schutte

According to many people, the Afrikaner Christian-National ideology (and its corollary apartheid) is a variant of Dutch Neo-Calvinism, the antirevolutionary theology and worldview of dr. Abraham Kuyper. A critical analysis of their histories (and the role of Kuyper's Vrije Universiteit as alma mater of many Afrikaner intellectuals) as well as their relative positions, however, reveals that Dutch and Afrikaner Calvinists are kin, but also that different fruits have grown from common roots, due to diverging social and political contexts.

Family Feud is a revised and abridged translation of De Vrije Universiteit en Zuid-Afrika 1880/2005, for which Gerrit Schutte, professor emeritys of history of Dutch Protestantism at VU University Amsterdam, received the 2006 Stals History Award of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns.